Android Ice Cream Sandwich demystified

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Like the rest of the Google-savvy geeks out there, everyone in the ExtremeTech bunker was glued to the live YouTube feed announcing Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), running on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Like most product releases, there were features that had been heavily leaked, and some bells and whistles that were pleasant surprises. Overall, ICS is an improvement to the Android platform, and it’s running on a beautiful device. The hardware presentation from Samsung did not hold any surprises since the specs for its newest flagship handset have been leaked and reported repeatedly, so there is nothing really there to explore.

However, Android 4.0 itself has some very juicy features indeed.

New lockscreen with “Face Unlock” recognition

Since most modern handsets have started shipping with a front-facing cam as a standard feature, the Android team decided it was time to throw in some facial recognition and allow you to unlock your phone with your ugly mug. Traditionally, Android had a code number or a drawing interface to unlock a handset upon wake up. Those features are still there, but now using Face Unlock, a user can simply point the device at their face, and let the phone recognize them from a stored photo. While not a terribly fast way to unlock your device, it adds a bit of elegance to the design. During the announcement, Facelock (that’s what we’re calling it) failed to recognize the speaker when he tried to demo it. Hopefully production units will not have that issue.

Honeycomb makes its way to handsets

There was a lot of buzz in the Android user base about Google’s decision to keep the source code to Honeycomb in-house. It turns out there was a good reason for this, as ICS has done the job of bringing the best Honeycomb features to the smartphone form factor. Check out the list of additions to ICS that are from Google’s tablet based Honeycomb:

Re-sizable widgets You can now decide how big or small to make information on your home screens

Stacks Some apps like YouTube, Market and News Republic have a sweet looking widget where information is displayed in graphical stacks of “sheets.” With a finger flick, sheets can be moved to the back of the stack in a really nice animated way.

Widget placement Android 4.0 makes it easier to place widgets on a desktop with a simple long press of the screen. From this long press, a menu pops up giving you all available widgets in a graphical format.

Soft buttons Honeycomb-based tablets have no physical buttons except power-on and the volume rocker. Interacting with the OS is all done through soft buttons on the screen, which has been brought into ICS now as well. Because of this, the screen of the Galaxy Nexus is 4.65 inches big, with very narrow bezel (4mm). It is honestly beautiful to look at.

Yes, pretty much — same as the desktop login-by-face apps that have existed for Windows for a long time.

It’s listed as ‘low security’ in the options, at least — but yes… people are still going to use it…

robert gordon

Google keeps Source code in house…….

Now lets see Android is supposed to be Open Source, and the reason for not releasing you Source back to the community is?

I think to all intents and purposes, for most users, most Android phones are very Closed Source, or perhaps Open Sauce?

Anonymous

From time to time Open Source community has seen fit to take their project development under wraps. Off the top of my head, Novell did this with 3D XGL and Compise Compositing Engine. It began as an completely Open Project. But Novell lead developer was met with a fragmented community, bent on destroying itself for their own interest. So they reigned it in totally in house to get it off the ground properly for 1 yr. Afterwards it was again Opened up to the community at large for input.

But you are obviously just a malcontent hater or competitor’s sleeper cell, pissed because he couldn’t ruin the Ice Cream Sandwich Party. But it’s obvious that most of all, you’re just after making Google look bad. Won’t Work…. haha… just like any other competitors that were out to sabotage Android, didn’t either.

The developer community at large, has basically been wanting Google and OHA members to do this anyway. To limit the chance of people like you coming in and derailing community efforts to make something work like it should. Don’t like it, then try to get into a closed proprietary project, where you can either do some good in it or be fired for trying to F**k it up!!!

robert gordon

Google keeps Source code in house…….

Now lets see Android is supposed to be Open Source, and the reason for not releasing you Source back to the community is?

I think to all intents and purposes, for most users, most Android phones are very Closed Source, or perhaps Open Sauce?

Anonymous

This is a little more like Ray! …..we don’t care that you’re not really a fan of Android, as long as you don’t skew the information! Kudos!

The Youtube video for ICS is getting fantastic reviews from the public.

Skip Montanaro

> There was a lot of buzz in the Android user base about Google’s decision to keep the source code to Honeycomb in-house.
> It turns out there was a good reason for this, as ICS has done the job of bringing the best Honeycomb features to the
> smartphone form factor.

I don’t see why that’s a good argument for closing the source code base.

Anonymous

In theory it was to prevent fragmentation. Specifically, display size fragmentation. Honeycomb was a quick release that took the shortcut of not supporting small resolutions.Stopping the spread of that rushed codebase actually makes some sense.

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